The folks at Confab just posted video of my chalktalk based on Show Your Work! It’s my last talk of the year, the culmination of all the speaking I’ve done for the past eight months or so. It’s about 50 minutes long, there’s a drawing lesson at 8:14, and the real meat of the talk begins around 13:44. Enjoy!

Yesterday I was browsing the Instagram account of one of my favorite artists, and I was struck by how entitled a few of the comments from fans were. I was inspired to write down the guidelines above, not as an artist myself, but as a fan. A few notes:

JWS: I argue in the book that the lone genius is a mythical creature. Which is not to say that we don’t require solitude and it’s not to say that we might not take sole ownership over our work as you and I both do — we don’t have anybody else’s name on the covers of our books. Yet, there are very often characters offstage who are not acknowledged.

In some ways, I’m probably the worst person to teach blackout poetry. I’ve done it for so long, I don’t even really think about it any more. Making art and teaching art are two different skill sets, and a quick Google search for “blackout poetry lesson plans” shows that there’s a small army of English teachers already doing it better than me, anyways.

That’s not to say I don’t like teaching, it’s just that I’m never sure I’m any good at it.

I’ve done some workshops with a lot of instruction and timed activities, but those always seem just a little bit off. So, this weekend at the Texas Teen Book Festival, I found myself in an auditorium full of teens, and the festival folks had already set out newspaper and markers in front of them, so I just thought, “You know what? Forget it. I’m going to give them as little instruction as possible, and we’ll just see what happens.”

I told the story of how I started blacking out, showed a timelapse video of how I make one, read a few, then told them they should just go for it. I spoke for another 10 minutes, showed some more examples, then I asked if anybody wanted to read theirs.

This is always the moment where I kind of hold my breath and think, “Uh oh. This is gonna be bad if nobody reads.”

But these teens! They started lining up at the microphone. And they read their poems like it was nothing. And they were great. And they would’ve kept lining up and reading if we didn’t run out of time.

It’s easy for an old fart like me to get jaded about everything, especially my work. Doing that workshop was a jolt of energy. It reminded me of Patti Smith, quoted in the book Please Kill Me:

Through performance, I reach such states, in which my brain feels so open… if I can develop a communication with an audience, a bunch of people, when my brain is that big and receptive, imagine the energy and intelligence and all the things I can steal from them.

I will make time for reading, the way I make time for meals, or brushing my teeth.

I will make an effort to carry a book with me at all times.

I will read whatever interests me. I will read novels. I will read poems. I will read essays. I will read short stories. I will read memoirs. I will read magazines. I will read newspapers. I will read comic books. I will read self-help. I will read street signs. I will read ads. I will read instruction manuals. I will read old love letters. Etc.

I had a nice conversation with Manjula Martin for the latest issue of Scratch, a digital magazine about writing and money. (They also used a blackout for the cover.) We talked about several topics, including self-promotion, selling out, and, of course, money:

Look, I do not have it figured out. I feel really good about my output up until this point. It’s been my dream to be able to stay at home and have a family and go out to my studio and do whatever I want. But I think the whiplash of it has been so quick that I’m still catching up with it.

It’s the imposter syndrome thing, where you think someone’s gonna knock on the door and take it all back.

So for me it always comes back to the daily practice. Having that bliss station set up and going to it and making your thing happen. Making sure you do that every day no matter what. Do the thing that feeds you, first. Then do the crazy business stuff.

I posted this picture of my studio on Instagram the other day, and people immediately began asking me about my “clipboard system,” assuming that I actually have a clipboard system. Read the rest of this entry »

When my dad brought home girlfriends, my grandpa, rather obnoxiously, would quiz them from his arm chair. I’m told the first question was usually, “So, what’s your philosophy of life?” (I’m not sure what my mother answered.)

I was thinking of my grandpa last week when I was asked a similarly baffling and broad question during an interview: “What is your definition of success?”

I hemmed and hawed a bit, until I finally said, “I suppose success is your days looking the way you want them to look.”

Sounded okay, but after I said it, I wondered what the hell it meant.

“What do you want your days to look like?” is a question I ask myself whenever I’m trying to make a decision about what to do next. In fact, I believe that most questions about what to do with one’s life can be replaced by this question.

What career should I choose? Should I go back to school? Where should I live? Should I get married? Should I have kids? Should I get a dog? Should I take up the piano?

“What do you want your days to look like?” forces you to imagine the day in, day out realities that making such choices will present you with.

Albert Camus once told a reporter, “One has to pass the time somehow.” And how you pass the time, what your days look like, well, as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Maybe success is just a matter of how the reality of the days match up to the ones in your imagination.

That’s not to say my ambitions these days are all that lofty. In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne, after spending the day with his five-year-old son, wrote in his journal, “We got rid of the day as well as we could.”